ESNEWS

ESNEWS is boxing media’s most relentless outlet: the YouTube empire of Elie Seckbach, the reporter the LA Times and Ring Magazine called the most influential boxing reporter — covering the fight game since 1997.

The access is the story. Seckbach’s ringside presence — the camera, the questions, the unmistakable energy — made him a fixture of boxing’s biggest moments. Fighters know him; promoters respect him; fans recognize the voice before the face.

The Deontay Wilder interviews are classics: candid, confrontational, quotable — the Bronze Bomber at his most unfiltered, drawn out by a reporter who knows how to ask. The Ruiz-Joshua era coverage captured a wild heavyweight chapter in real time.

The résumé is unmatched in the space: a Mark Twain Award from the Associated Press, an Emmy, a Golden Mike, Boxing Reporter of the Year honors — plus the surreal honor of being sampled by Lil Wayne on “Kobe Bryant.” When hip-hop samples your interviews, you have transcended sports media.

The daily grind never stops: gym visits, fight weeks, press conferences, and the endless pursuit of the quote. ESNEWS is less a channel than a newsroom — one reporter’s obsession, broadcast daily.

The origin story is pure internet. The Israeli-born Seckbach covered sports — mostly the NBA — for the Los Angeles Daily News, CBS-TV, NBC-TV, and FOX 11 before the pivot that changed everything. In 2008 he posted a video of a fighter he’d barely heard of named Manny Pacquiao. It did 300,000 views overnight — at a time when Seckbach considered 2,000 views viral and his LeBron James and Kobe Bryant interviews were pulling 10,000 to 15,000. The message was unmistakable. He shifted his focus to boxing and never looked back.

Traditional boxing media was already shrinking when Seckbach became what the LA Times described as a pioneer: as newspapers and TV outlets scaled back their boxing coverage, the sport turned to new media for exposure, and Seckbach was already there — in the gyms, capturing the carefree banter between fighters and trainers, asking lighthearted questions that occasionally produced genuinely insightful answers.

The credentials run longer than most realize. Before YouTube, Seckbach reported for AOL Sports FanHouse starting in 2008, covered the Los Angeles Lakers for NBC-TV’s website, appeared in the film Who Shot Mamba, and in 2008 took the stage at the Blog World convention in Las Vegas to talk about the future of new media journalism. In 2011 he produced more than 100 episodes of a reality series built around Robert Garcia, the trainer of the year — three consecutive years of dominance documented from the inside.

And then there is the Lil Wayne story. In 2009, hip-hop superstar Wayne dropped “Kobe Bryant,” a rap song honoring the Lakers legend — and sampled Seckbach six times, including a piece of his interview with Orlando’s Mickael Pietrus. It is one of those details that sounds invented until you hear it: the boxing reporter’s voice, looped through a Wayne track.

The numbers tell their own story: a channel founded in November 2006, more than 140,000 videos uploaded, and well over half a billion — and at points more than a billion — total views. For a one-man operation, the output is staggering: gym visits, interviews, fight-week coverage, a one-man newsroom operating at wire-service speed. Boxing’s news cycle runs on Seckbach’s camera as much as any outlet’s.

Not everyone in the sport loves the camera. In one memorable recent episode, Tyson Fury singled Seckbach out of a media scrum at his own media day and had him ejected — “You can’t interview me. See you in a bit. Bye!” Seckbach’s response was pure Seckbach: he thanked Fury for the attention, noting the ejection got him more views than any Q&A ever would. The man turns getting thrown out of a press conference into content.

The “most entertaining reporter” label — from CNN’s Andy Gray — captures the duality: serious access, delivered with showmanship. ESNEWS is journalism, but it is also theater — and boxing has always been both.

Nearly three decades in, Elie Seckbach remains the most entertaining reporter in boxing — the internet age’s Howard Cosell, still ringside, still asking. ESNEWS: reporting, always.

The channel’s longevity is its own argument. Boxing media has consolidated, fragmented, and reconsolidated several times since Seckbach started uploading — promoters built their own platforms, podcasts ate the interview circuit, and short-form video rewrote the rules of the highlight. Through every shift, ESNEWS kept doing the one thing that never goes out of style: showing up. The gym is still the newsroom, the camera is still on, and somewhere in Los Angeles right now, Elie Seckbach is asking a question nobody else thought to ask.